


Don't Try To Wake Me in the Morning

by CheerUpLovely



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Character Death, F/M, Suicide, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-02
Updated: 2016-04-02
Packaged: 2018-05-30 19:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6437428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheerUpLovely/pseuds/CheerUpLovely
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This didn’t just happen. This isn’t a decision he woke up this morning and decided on. He’s planned this for weeks, since he realised that this really isn’t going to get better. He’s tried everything at his disposal, but he can’t bring himself to take any other option. This was not something he decided this morning. This was something that happened because he’s been on a long, endless battle and he knows that he’s losing that fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Try To Wake Me in the Morning

**Author's Note:**

> alexiablackbriar13 said: Hi Sammy. It’s your British friend who died because of 4x16. Please fulfil my dying wish for me? Prompt: Post 4x16. Felicity’s words to Oliver, that they can never be together & they’re over for good, leave Oliver feeling like he doesn’t deserve happiness, or to live. Cue angst - after Felicity leaves, he has an emotional breakdown in the Lair. Dig & Lance/Thea find him & have to call Felicity back to try & stop him from hurting or even killing himself. She’s the only person who can reach him.
> 
> anhourbeforemidnight said: In a world where oliver and felicity know each other since they are children and are super close. Oliver is sinking lower and lower into depressed to the point of trying to commit suicide and felicity catches him when he is about to kill himself and maybe stops him maybe not. Make me cry sammy make me cry

The second his head span so badly he had to slump to the ground, Oliver knew what he was doing.

It’s not selfish. He doesn’t think it’s selfish at all. He knows that it’s bad - that it’s awful - because a life is ending. How can that, ultimately, be a good thing? It’s a bad thing. He’s going to die. He’s a living, breathing, feeling person and he’s about to die, but while it’s bad, it’s not selfish. This isn’t happening because he’s selfish, it’s because he’s depressed. He doesn’t have any control over that, so it can’t be selfish. There’s no ‘feel better’, no ‘cheer up’, because it’ll never get any better for him. It’s not giving up. It’s that there’s no other way.

This didn’t just happen. This isn’t a decision he woke up this morning and decided on. He’s planned this for weeks, since he realised that this really isn’t going to get better. He’s tried everything at his disposal, but he can’t bring himself to take any other option. This was not something he decided this morning. This was something that happened because he’s been on a long, endless battle and he knows that he’s losing that fight.

It’s funny, isn’t it? They call it committing suicide. It’s the second thing in his life that he’s ever committed too, and if he weren’t so afraid of being sick and ruining the moment he might have laughed. But he is committing. He’s been preparing, he’s been accepting, and he’s going all in for this one final attempt to make it all better. He’s made his arrangements, settled his will. He’s left his messages for the people that matter.

He’s called everyone he still holds dear. He’s listened to them talk about their days, listened to stories about their kids driving them insane, promised to attend birthday parties next week, assured them that he’ll see them for the holidays and not spend it alone like he did last year.

His doctors diagnosed the depression months ago, gave him medication, offered him therapy, but none of it has helped. How could it? He wanted it to, though. He’d read the success stories and hoped that he could be one of them, be a survivor, be a man who picks up his life and carries on while family and friends discuss how brave he is, how strong he is. But as much as he wants to be, he isn’t. It’s not his fault, he knows. It’s like bad wiring. It’s chemical imbalance. It’s a sickness that you can’t drug away, because if there were truly a pill that could make happy he’d have taken twenty of those instead and he wouldn’t have washed it down with a bottle of vodka.

There’s no future for him anymore. He knows that. He’d had it all, and he’d been happy. He knew what it felt like to have a future, to have a chance at something spectacular, and that wasn’t what he felt when he woke up that morning. All he felt was an ending. There was nothing after today that he hasn’t already failed to improve, and why carry on? Why live as a pained, wreck of a human being, if he can be at peace?

All he wants is the peace.

“Oliver? _OLIVER_!”

Her voice is like a beacon. Of course she’s here. Felicity Smoak. Always at his side when he needs her. It’s why he loves her. She’s his best friend and he loves her. It’s that simple.

What isn’t simple is that she has to be here in this moment. He remembers trying to call her, as if he might be granted the sound of her voice in his passing moments, but he hasn’t imagined she’d actually come. He almost wishes that she hadn’t, because she’ll want him to live. She’ll try to give him reasons to carry on. She’ll be devastated to sit with her best friend as he dies.

But he wants her to stay. He wants is final moments to be filled with her, and that part? Maybe that’s the selfish part.

“Felicity,” he breathes, his voice slurred as she drops to his side and takes his face in her hands.

The touch of her hands makes him realise how isolated he has felt for the last…god, how long has it been since he hasn’t?

Three hundred and sixty-six days.

“ _God_ , Oliver, what are you… please, tell me you’re not…”

“You’re here,” he observes, reaching out with a tingling arm to place his hand over her forearm.

“Of course I’m here” she mumbles. “I’m always…” She breaks off with a sharp inhale and after that her voice is tighter, threatening to break. “Oliver, you _can’t_ … _please_ , don’t…”

She breaks off, as if she can’t finish as sentence that involves losing him. He doesn’t regret it though, even as he takes in her tear stained cheeks as she leans over him. This is what he needs to do. This is what he needs to do to be happy. He needs to feel the peace that can only come from oblivion, and as the world starts to shimmer around the edges of her face, he knows that it’s coming for him soon.

“I want this,” he whispers, his hand cupping her cheek with what little co-ordination is left to him.

“No, you don’t,” she argues, shaking her head.

“Please,” he murmurs quietly. “I…I can’t _do_ this any more. This is what I want.”

His head spins again and he slams his eyes shut, swallowing at the wave of nausea that rolls his stomach. He feels hot now, but numb at the same time. He always thought death would come for him with a cold hand, but what he feels now is a warmth.

He moves so his head is laying in her lap, and yes, this is what he wants. This is where he wants to spend his final moments. Here, with the girl he has spent his entire life loving.

He’s loved Felicity as he can remember, his childhood best friend who grew to become the love of his life. He loved her at ten years old when they were playing his back yard, at fourteen when they shared their first kisses, at sixteen when they awkwardly discovered sex in his bedroom, at eighteen when they travelled between colleges at weekends, at twenty when they got married.

But nothing lasts, does it?

Not even now, as he settles with his head in her lap and realises he cannot remember the last time he’s done this. The train journeys to Boston when she attended M.I.T. seem so far away now, just like a memory of her smiling. He doesn’t see her smile now, because she’s crying - for him - as she strokes her hand through his hair and holds him in place, right where he wants to be.

With her.

“Please,” he whispers again.

“We need to-”

“Felicity,” he breathes, with a tiny shake of his head. “ _No_. Just you.”

It’s all he’s ever needed. He still isn’t sure why he deserved to lose her, but he’s glad that she’s come back to him now, at the end of it all. He’s glad that he gets to see her one last time.

“Okay,” she whispers back, but he hears the break in her tone as she moves her hand to his face, stroking up and down his cheek - that’s nice, that’s really nice, just like Sunday mornings when he’d wake up to her touch. Oh God, yes, give him this in his final moments.

“Stay,” he pleads softly.

“Always,” she assures him, leaning down to press a kiss to his forehead.

He doesn’t feel it, though. He doesn’t feel anything now except for the dull tingle that spreads through him, numbness taking control as what little focus he has starts to darken. Oh. Oh, okay. So this is it.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction that has him gasping, trying to reach for her but all he can hear is her voice muffling. He’s very aware of his own heartbeat, a slow, dull thud that fills his head as he hears a small whimper leave his lips. He tries to tell her the important things - that he’s sorry, that he still loves her, that he never stopped…

But he hears her tell him that she loves him, and then there’s nothing at all.

—

“Oliver?”

When his eyes open, he fears that he failed. The worst thing for him to endure now would be to recover from this nightmare and have to go on with his loved ones watching his every move - to be cheated of the peace he was searching for. But what he sees isn’t a hospital bed, or even his own bed. It’s just a haze.

He isn’t hurting any more. He doesn’t feel anything.

But he hears her voice.

He knows then that this has worked. Because he wouldn’t hear her if it hadn’t. He hadn’t known that they would end up together but she’s right before him when his eyes open, blonde hair and blue eyes that watch him with a mixture of disappointment and relief. Disappointment that he’s here. Relief that they’re together.

“Oliver…” she repeats, as he moves towards her.

She’s still beautiful, still perfect. Still everything he remembers her to be. It’s been three-hundred and sixty-six days since he last saw her, since she was taken away from him, and now here she is. When he reaches her and places his hands on her cheeks, he can feel her - actually feel her under his hands - and it breaks him, tugging willing tears onto his cheeks as he embraces her.

“Felicity…”

“Why?” She asks him, squeezing her arms around him as if to prove point that she can.

“There was no other way,” he whispers, clinging to her.

One year and a day ago, he embraced her like this. She was nervous about a meeting at work, and he’d tugged her back at the door for a long hug, told her that she’d be great, that she had nothing to worry about. She’d reminded him that he had to say that because he was her husband, and she had gone off to work with a slightly-less nervous smile. Her meeting had overrun, and she’d gone out for a late lunch with a colleague.

Then Oliver had been pulled out of his own meeting by the police.

A car had crashed into hers, a drunk driver, and it had slammed the dashboard up to the two passengers, pinning them in place. Her colleague had died instantly. Felicity was still alive, but pinned. As soon as they moved her to get her out of the car, her injuries would release and she’d die within moments. She’d asked for Oliver. He’d gone with the police, not sure how he was supposed to react, not sure what he was going to say, or what he was about to see, but it didn’t matter. By the time he’d arrived, she was already gone. She’d been talking to the paramedics one moment, then the next she’d gone.

But he hadn’t just lost her. He’d lost his everything, because there wasn’t a single part of his life that wasn’t knotted with her. His childhood, his teenage years, his college days…it was all her. She was his wife, his soulmate, his best friend. She was the mother of his unborn child, the little baby they’d dubbed “peanut” as they didn’t know the sex. He’d lost his entire future in a moment, and people had expected him to carry on living after that?

He’d tried for a year. He’d tried so many ways of coping - from sleeping on his sister’s couch because he couldn’t face sleeping in their bed, from drinking excessively, from avoiding as much of life as he could…but nothing worked. There was no living without her.

But now? Now, she’s here. She’s here, and he’s here.

“I tried,” he whispers into her shoulder. “I really did, I-”

“I know,” she pulls back, framing his face with her hands. “I was with you the whole time.”

He sighs, resting his forehead against hers. Now that he can experience this again - her touch, her warmth - he just wants to drown in it. If this is a place where time is nonsensical, he wants to spend his eternity in the arms of the woman who has loved him like no other.

“The whole time?” He swallows.

“I never left,” she assures him quietly. “Every time you spoke to me, thought of me… I was there. I was always there.”

He can’t speak for that, because it takes him back to the nights he’d curl into her pillow, or speak her name into the darkness, because the idea of her frustrations as she sat beside him and watched him cry, unable to touch him, unable to be heard - that’s more painful than having to endure her loss.

He’s just about ready to surrender himself into this absence of life, this space where she exists alongside him once again, when she’s stepping back out of his arms, tugging on his hands. “Come meet your son.”

_Son._

_Come meet your son._

“Felicity…”

She gives him a smile, one that he’s never seen on her except when she was touching that barely-there bump that was still something just for them. It’s now he notices that she doesn’t have it. “He had a heartbeat. He was alive, he had a soul,” she explains. “So he came here too, with me.”

“I have a son,” he swallows.

“I’m not sure how he’ll grow here, what time is like, but yeah… he’s everything we ever wanted him to be,” she smiles.

And he is. His little boy is perfect. He can’t tell what age he’s supposed to be, but he’s around a year old, nestled in Oliver’s arms for the first time as he learns what it is to what Felicity meant about never leaving. Because he clings a little too tightly to his son as he watches people discover his body - first his friend, John, who had stopped by unexpectedly, and then his younger sister.

They’re the only two people he had left after he lost Felicity. He wished it’d been enough to stay alive for them, but it wasn’t that easy. He knows they may not understand that, but he pulls Felicity closer with one arm when John tells his sister that it’s okay, that he’s where he wants to be, that he’ll be with her now.

It’s still there - everything he felt before, the loss, the emptiness, the depression. He knows it’s still there. Even death isn’t an instant fix. But it’s in a part of his mind that he knows he doesn’t need any more - as if he’s filed it away with the need to pay taxes and how long the drive to the supermarket is.

“Did you do it for you, or did you do it for us?” Felicity asks him some time after, when his body has been taken away and what’s left of his living family is gathering to drink to him.

“Does it make a difference?” He returns, balancing the comforting weight of his son.

“You know it does,” she reminds him.

He thinks back on those last few weeks - weeks where he advanced paid the rent as not to put their struggling landlord out of pocket, where he updated his will to leave everything to his sister, where he pre-wrote letters to his nearest and dearest.

“I told myself it was to be with you, but I think really it was for me,” he mutters. “I was becoming a person I didn’t like, someone I didn’t recognise… Someone I didn’t want to be.”

“You were depressed, Oliver…” she starts, but he shakes his head, cutting him off.

“It was more than that,” he tells her. “I…I can’t explain it, because you haven’t felt it. But when you realise how easy it would be to just… it’s _scary_. It’s so frightening how _easy_ it was, especially when you realise you don’t have enough things to hold on to.”

She takes his hand, offering up what he didn’t have before - something to hold on to.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to die,” he explains in a mumble. “It’s more that I didn’t know how to live any more.”

And here, now, with the woman he loved and lost and the child he never met - he feels more alive than he’s ever done. This is peace. Peace is weightless, it’s his wife’s perfume, it’s his son’s breaths. As a dramatic love-sick fifteen year old, he’d told her that he would die for her, he wonders if this holds the same sense of romance. It’s not selfish to do what he needed to be happy. It’s not selfish to miss the love of his life when she was taken from him by a drunk driver. It’s  not selfish to have fallen into depression and not seen a way out.

“I know it’s selfish,” Felicity whispers as she sets her lips against his shoulders. “But I’m glad you can see me again.”

“Me too,” he agrees quietly, as he turns his focus onto her, and only her.

As it always has been.

**Author's Note:**

> This was difficult to write and I’ve been pondering over it for a while because I did lose a friend to suicide a little under a year ago, and it was incredibly difficult to cope with, but it also really opened my eyes up to the motivations that go into it. It is by no way a light decision to make, and (because I’ve seen a lot of this on social media lately) the instruction of “kill yourself” is NEVER a term to be directed at another human being. EVER. No exceptions. No matter who you are, or who you are speaking to, that is under no circumstances a way to speak to another person.


End file.
